THE POWER OF GIZMODO: I’ve been looking for a small digital camera that also takes web-quality video with sound, and is cheap enough to take places where it might get damaged. This morning I saw this Gateway camera on Gizmodo, for $199. Went to the nearby Gateway store, tried it, bought it, and it’s up to expectations. (And plumb easy to use; the controls are very intuitive.)

But what was really interesting was that everybody at the Gateway store knew about Gizmodo, and several said that they bought a lot of stuff in response to items there. I don’t have any idea how much traffic Gizmodo is getting these days, but it’s clearly reaching its target market.

UPDATE: Well, the camera wasn’t that great — and didn’t sync reliably to my laptop — so I returned it. The Gateway folks were very good about taking it back, after deciding that they couldn’t figure out what the problem could be (MPEG4 devices tend to be hinky, apparently). I bought a Toshiba still camera that also records video in .avi instead.